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• W23559596 abstract "Edward Ferrars alone among Austen's heroes does not dance, Penelope Fritzer observes in Jane Austen and Eighteenth-Century Courtesy Books (36). This observation may not be entirely true, but we as the readers of the novel certainly never see Edward (or Elinor) trip the light fantastic. By all accounts, this absence is a great in the novel. Abler pens have detailed the meaning and uses of dancing in Austen's novels; these writers have even commented from time to time on the lack of dance scenes in Sense and Sensibility. They have been content, however, to heave a sigh of regret rather than to ask why Austen chose to eschew dance scenes in this story. The choice seems especially strange when we consider that dance features importantly in Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, the two other early works. I would argue that Austen deliberately omits dancing from this novel. Three motives seem to drive her artistic choices for this novel: a desire to frustrate mythic expectations as she replaces symbolic actions with realistic ones; a desire to disconnect the spirit of play from the development of mature, long-lasting love; and a desire to create plain, old-fashioned suspense. Through this and other artistic choices, Austen creates a novel with a designedly somber tone, a novel dominated by the anxieties and difficulties of the cast of this problem comedy. EDWARDS CHARACTER Cynthia Griffin has said that [t]he reader is hard-put to respond to Edward. We know is supposed to attract us, but his backward behavior and seeming distaste for action do not recommend him in our eyes (46). Langdon Elsbree even more damningly remarks that the dull Elinor, Colonel Brandon, and Edward sit out dances or never engage in them, behavior that indicates a subtle of energies in the three (118). Elsbree is, however, wrong to think that Austen considers this deficiency of energies as evidence of a natural phlegmatic disposition in any of the three characters targets. Austen, in spite of her admiration for both energy and, more especially, exertion, distinguishes the charms of physical vitality from virtue, kindness, and fidelity, even in Pride and Prejudice (from whose second half dancing is also notably absent). Still, if we consider him in the context of Austen's other novels, mere sobriety of spirits does not fully account for Edward's characteristics. The character Edward most resembles is, oddly, one who is very much associated with music and dance: Emma's Jane Fairfax. Austen paints him with the same moodiness, stiffness in conversation, and reticence that she later includes in her picture of Jane. Like her, is involved in a chafing secret engagement, which oppresses the candor of his spirit. As Tony Tanner notes, secrecy and sickness are linked in this novel, though regrettably does not turn that observation to the task of explaining Edward's manner. Later in the London scenes of the novel, Austen imagines Edward avoiding social events, no doubt because is engaged to Lucy Steele and wishes to avoid meeting either her or Elinor in public. There can be no dancing if the gentleman is not on the scene, and most assuredly wishes to absent himself from it given his uncomfortable situation. Austen nowhere says that Edward does not dance because cannot or does not wish to. The issue never comes up--as it certainly does in regard to Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley. Edward's natural disposition is not on display until the end of the novel: at the beginning of volume 3, chapter 13, the narrator has a little laugh at Edward's discomfiture about proposing to Elinor as he was not altogether inexperienced in such a question (361). She is about to describe his transformation into genuine, flowing, grateful cheerfulness (362), and she devotes more time to their discussion after their engagement than to any other dialogue between the two in the novel. Thus we see that her withholding of such scenes to this point is also a form of suspense: the reader wants to see the two together in private, and we finally do. …" @default.
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• W23559596 date "2013-01-01" @default.
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• W23559596 title "Why Edward Ferrars Doesn't Dance" @default.
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